Friday, January 15, 2016

Martha Stewart's Apple Crostata is one of my go-to desserts for fall and winer. In a moment of sugary madness I made the crostada and these roasted pears for recent winter party. The crostata is nice because the dough makes enough for two, so I just keep it in the freezer and thus can quickly pull this particular dessert together as long as there are apples in the house. You can find the recipe here.

There is only one thing to remember when you are making this dessert, bake it on a pan with sides to catch any drips. And put a cylinder of rolled up tin foil around the edge to hold it in place till it hardens during baking. The first minutes in a warm oven make the sides want to collapse so you need to figure out a way to keep that from happening. It's too pretty and too delicious a dessert to let that little problem stop you from making it.

Thursday, December 10, 2015

You'd be hard pressed to find a book as different from "Oudolf Hummelo" as "The Gardens of Arne Maynard." Given that I deeply appreciate the work of both men, I should have a much more chaotic garden than I do. I confine my Oudolf worship to trips to Lurie Garden in Chicago and my Arne adoration to drowning in the pages of his book while sipping tea and sitting by the fire. I bought both of these books the minute they were published, unable to wait to see if they appeared under my Christmas tree. But they would make perfect presents for the gardeners on your list.

Unlike "Oudolf Hummelo," this is a big book: 10" x 12" and an inch and a quarter thick. It's got glossy photos, double-page spreads and even tri-fold images. The photography is the work of Maynard's life partner, William Collinson, and captures the history of his work, especially at their two personal gardens. The book also has the most beautiful endpapers I've seen in years: elegant black and white drawings of Fritillaries by Jane Hyslop. The book covers twelve gardens in great depth with both text and images. Only two are outside the UK: one in East Hampton, Long Island in the U.S. and the other in Italy. I found them well-thought-out-and-designed but less interesting than Maynard's gardens in the UK.

With a big, coffee table style book like this one on Maynard's gardens, I often just revel in the images, read the cutlines and dip briefly into the text here and there. The minute I started reading this, I couldn't stop. Not only are there fascinating lessons about how Arne looks at existing landscapes and then discerns what to save and where to start afresh, it is a beautifully written book. Intelligent, evocative and highly personal — at least in terms of the subject at hand. The long pieces on specific gardens are divided with shorter sections that look at the things that Maynard considers "essential" to his gardens: Roses, Topiary, Kitchen Gardens (below) to name a few. These short pieces are about 6 pages long and heavy on examples.

I was very taken with most of Maynard's gardens for clients and his discussions with them about appropriate solutions. He also mentioned differences in working in the UK and the U.S., in particular, our lack of the kind of quality specialist nurseries that pepper England. Because many of the gardens he designs are for people with lots of land and money, he is able to hire skilled craftspeople to make furniture, gates, build walls and such. These aren't things that most of us can afford but we can learn from Maynard's approach about how to incorporate such items into the landscape and link them with our own house and history. I think of the Arborvitae tree trunks we saved when we took out a tree to put in the pond in 1997 and how many places we've used them in the garden. And of the few skilled artists we were able to hire, like Matt Wineke who did our recent driveway project.

But most of all I enjoyed reading about the gardens that Maynard created for his own houses. I remember when I saw this tree (above) at his first garden at Guanock House and marveled that someone had the sense to leave it right there in the middle of the path. I should have realized that this was the work of a very thoughtful gardener.

Listen to Maynard describe his current house and garden, Allt-y-bela in Wales (below): "The moment I saw the garden, I said the house was like an exotic pearl sitting on a cushion of green velvet, and now we're embroidering the cushion with native and species plants. The topiary is the Elizabethan stump work on the cushion, and my rarities are the occasional golden threads that give it another dimension. It is all very delicately crafted, all hand-stitched."

I fell in love with gardening while researching a piece of Elizabethan stump work, so his words caught at my heart. The last words — "delicately crafted, all hand-stitched — certainly speak to all of us whose gardens are the work of our own hands (and backs and knees).

Despite the size and complexity of many of the gardens shown in this book, my copy of "The Gardens of Arne Maynard" is chock full of scraps of paper marking pages with bulbs I want to order and combinations of flowering plants I want to try. Everywhere I looked and read I found something of value, like these incredible crab apple trees (below). No, I won't do an elegantly topiaried pair like this, but I am seriously thinking about growing this variety ('Red Sentinel') where we just lost an ancient Macintosh apple tree in our garden.

Editor's note: I purchased this book on my own and did not receive any remuneration for this post.

Friday, June 05, 2015

Our garden has a pair of full size Macintosh apple trees that were planted when our house was built in 1954. Unfortunately they were never pruned in the early days to control their shape. So they've grown splayed open with the crotch of the trees collecting water and weakening them. The photo below is from 2010.

The tree in the foreground in the picture above was down to its last limb when we finally cut it down this week. The picture below shows the stump more or less even with the ground and the last chunk of the trunk. The dark spots are rotted sections with openings of various sizes.

The apple trees presided over my original moss garden. When we were initially creating the garden I could not do any planting for the first few years as we created the hardscaping and paths. So I pulled out the grass under these trees exposing the moss growing there. It was a relaxing project and for a long time I enjoyed weeding this area. But now there are too many other chores and this has become a labor intensive area with not enough visual reward for the energy required to maintain it.

After taking down the one apple tree Mark pruned the other to take some weight off the limbs and allow more light through. This area is about to become a temporary holding bed while we do our last big front garden project: replacing the driveway and turning the slope up to the garden into an informal rock garden complete with stone steps. Before the work begins mid-month, I need to remove two feet of plants the length of the driveway border. Thus this area under the apple tree will handle those plants until the project is finished and they can return home.

Then we will redesign the apple tree garden. No clear plan at the moment — other than incorporating the 15 solid green Hakonechloa plants I bought a few weeks ago. They are currently living in pots on the deck.

One of our massive 58-year-old Austrian pines came down in a storm at the end of December. It took out a couple of smaller trees as it fell but amazingly did not damage the fence. Mark and an arborist friend carefully cut it down in January.

FEBRUARY

I barely blogged or looked out the window I was so depressed over the loss of my big pine tree since it meant my shade garden was now pretty much in full sun. I cocooned indoors with good food, books and lots of candles.

MARCH

It seemed like it took forever, but it turned out the snowdrops appeared right on schedule when I compared their arrival date with prior years. However neither winter nor the snow were over.

APRIL

Fred and Ethel flew in with barely enough open water on our pond for a smooth landing. Looked painful to me but didn't seem to bother them. Look how much snow is still on the ground on April 7th!

MAY

The garden finally burst into full bloom with a spectacular month of flowers. Everything from our ancient apple trees to these primroses and Trilliums was lush, given the drought of the prior year.

JUNE

Record rains kept the garden green and going strong. It also sent water into our basement and Mark spent much of the summer re-landscaping one side of the house to try to send the snow-melt and rainwater away from the house.

JULY

After 13 years our Stewartia finally flowered on its lower branches. For years we mostly enjoyed the flowers as they fell to the ground from the top branches. A real thrill!

AUGUST

Despite the wet spring, by late summer it was dry enough that I had to drag out the hoses to water my new shrub and tree purchases as well as all the plants that got new homes after the pine tree came out.

SEPTEMBER

Plenty of flowers were happy with the sun and dryness like this geranium. It's growing in a pot on the deck with a fern and a clump of Tiarella or Heucherella, both of which I just dug out of the garden. I brought the pot into the house at the end of October; the fern has mostly faded but the other two plants are looking great, as is the pot of rosemary just visible on the far right.

OCTOBER

Mark spent late summer and fall working on the Tea House. He finished all the doors, windows and a couple of protective shutters. Next summer he plans to do the finish carpentry on the interior. We sat inside with the doors open having a cup of afternoon coffee quite a few days during the fall.

NOVEMBER

We had a fence built on the east side of the garden, mulched many bags of leaves and also gathered 4 or 5 bags of white pine needles from our neighbors' trees. They will be used to refresh all my pine needle paths in the spring. From my first, rather sad little garden up to the present day, I have no qualms about cutting flowers to enjoy indoors. Making my own bouquets is the main reason I grow flowers. The last thing I did in November was to cut a couple of bouquets of leaves and seed-heads for the Thanksgiving table and for arrangements to put in the bathrooms. One small vaseful of dried seedheads remains, refreshed with evergreen prunings.

DECEMBER

Twenty-eight new or favorite trees and shrubs — mostly dwarf varieties — were caged for the winter. We seem to have Peter Rabbit and his family living under our deck. But tracks outside the windows show that someone who travels on four feet has been trying to find the bunnies. Not sure if it's a fox or coyote. So far we can't tell if he's had any success. I am one who likes her plants more than Peter R.

Friday, May 24, 2013

It's the rare gardener who has not been seduced by Vita Sackville-West's famed White Garden at Sissinghurst Castle. Certainly I count myself among their numbers. But though I love white flowers, I like too many other colors to be disciplined enough to limit myself to a one-color garden. Instead I let my white flowers act as dramatic accents.

A recent article in The Guardian newspaper about The White Garden mentioned that many of its plants are too large for most modern gardens. This full-size, almost 60-year-old McIntosh apple tree is my equivalent. It's huge and scents the entire garden when covered with blossoms as it was this week.

The view of the tree from our neighbor's garden.

Equally fragrant, equally beautiful and even more dramatic in bloom is the diminutive crabapple, Malus sargentii 'Tina'

Tina has red buds which open white. She was blooming in the front garden while the big apple was in flower in the back garden.

I do have one small bed that's mostly white flowers including a white bleeding heart, Pulmonaria 'Sissinghurst White' and this Korean azalea, Rhododendron yedoense poukhanense 'Alba'

This Paeonia rockii from Seneca Hill has buds like giant marshmallows and massive ruffled flowers.

I've had good luck with foxgloves and just added this one, Digitalis purpurea 'Pam's Choice'

Primula sieboldii invaded by self-sown Trilliums

This massive Trillium grandiflorum was in the garden when we moved here.

One of the tiny "bells" from our Carolina Silverbell tree, Halesia tetrapetra. The falling petals carpet everything around the tree when they come down. We've surprised a lot of visitors with our "flowering" pine tree.

Friday, June 29, 2012

This garden — located on a main neighborhood artery — is one that we drive by constantly. Over the years the house has changed hands and I no longer can remember when this retaining wall was planted.

Our mild winter, early spring and current hot, dry, sunny weather have made these particular plants very happy.

Most years there is some overlap in the bloom times of the various yellow succulents and the lavender. But I've only ever noticed them all flower in unison once. It was too spectacular to forget.

Unfortunately we didn't take a picture of that memorable event, thinking it would occur again. So this year I made sure we snapped the luscious lavender.

Though most of the succulents have yet to open, the lavender has never flowered so profusely nor with such intense color. It's a dramatic follow-up to the soft spring scene that's dominated by flowering crabapple trees.

These are simple and restrained plantings, but they make what could be an imposing and impersonal wall into a neighborhood showcase.

Monday, May 28, 2012

Mark usually tackles the job of pruning our two old apple trees in late February or early March, when there is still snow on the ground but it's warm enough to spend an afternoon working outdoors. This year there wasn't the usual late winter kind of day to do that job, so it got done as the garden was actually springing to life.

Over the years we've made a habit of saving those apple tree prunings to use as an edging for garden paths. This year was no different and I put them in a number of locations as I cleaned up and mulched the beds in April.

For whatever reason — the warm winter, late pruning, unseasonably hot spring — a number of the apple hoops that I stuck in the ground have sent out new leaves. Just another sign of a year in which none of us know what kind of weather to expect next — or how it will affect the garden!

Monday, April 11, 2011

Last summer Mark had to seriously prune one of our ancient apple trees. We love this tree and thus added a support crutch (a peeled trunk from an old arbor vitae) to help the remaining half of the apple tree carry the load. A friend who has an older redbud tree with a gorgeous spreading form propped up an expansive branch with two birch trunks.

Giving trees a bit of help in this fashion is something you often see in Japanese gardens, and so we are attuned to finding examples of this technique wherever we go. We found the solution below on the city's east side near Madison Kipp, clearly the work of another tree lover.

Monday, October 04, 2010

One half of the more fragile of our pair of 55-year-old apple trees finally gave up the ghost this summer. Mark used the occasion to justify the purchase of a chain saw which he needed to safely remove the dead branches and part of the trunk. The remainder of the tree appears healthy and sent up this interesting new growth — which we present as a present for our blogging friend in Vermont, Altoon Sultan, who has done a number of posts featuring fascinating fungi.

Saturday, May 01, 2010

I thought it was time to give the macro lens a rest and take a wider view of what's been happening in our garden.

Beginning at the bridge, this view to the south takes in our two ancient Macintosh apple trees in full bloom, the dwarf currant hedge, as well as our new (as of last Summer) black gravel paving material.

There's nothing like the delicate color of apple blossoms...

... especially when contrasted with the weathered bark of the old limbs.

This is the long view across the length of the pond to the tea house, still sheathed in its pink styrofoam. My next job is to attach the metal lath, inside and out, prior to applying the stucco -- in a more subdued color.

Looking under the lilac trunks toward the apple trees from the back edge of the yard...

...and from the same spot in the other direction, toward what we have named the Sacred Grove.

This woodland Peony is certainly the queen of this corner of the garden today. With the rains expected in a couple of hours her reign is about to end.

The view across the yard from near the Tea House with a glimpse of the pond in the lower left corner.

This shot was taken across the pond looking South toward the gate in the back fence. The Bloodgood Japanese maple and our baby Dawn Redwood occupy the left side of the picture.

Two found object sculptures in a sea of mixed Lily-of-the-Valley and Sweet Woodruff.

The flowering crab apple in the front yard is one of a dozen or so trees that survive from the house's original landscape plan. The house was built in 1954, which makes these trees at least 55 years old.

On the other hand, we planted the River Birches to create this little grove in 1998.

This picture was taken from the path near the street looking across the Moon Garden toward the front of the house.

This group of Daffodils bordering the curb provide some floral entertainment for pedestrians and bikers in the street (we have no sidewalks on our block) .

And finally, our somewhat pathetic effort to create an Oak savanna, Dandelions and all. It's located, of course, under the Burr Oak at the juncture of the street and our driveway.